There is a need to provide emergency lighting in lighted spaces, especially commercial buildings, in the event of a main power outage. Emergency lighting systems must provide light of sufficient intensity and for a sufficient duration to meet safety standards and operators must test emergency lighting systems to ensure compliance. Known test procedures for emergency lighting systems are manual, where a maintenance engineer visits the site periodically to physically cut the power in order for the backup power supply to the lighting system, such as a battery, to take over the powering of the emergency fixtures to ensure the fixtures light up and last for the minimum required amount of time. The current manual method is very laborious and therefore costly to maintain.
Digital Addressable Lighting Interface (DALI®) is one known, standard lighting protocol for emergency testing. The test procedure is done via scheduling or manually at the local control panel so that a maintenance engineer may be present on site to supervise and confirm compliance. In countries such as the United Kingdom (UK), the emergency lighting has to perform with minimum lux levels for a set length of time. The test procedure is designed to last the minimum time, i.e., 3 hours for the UK, and when finished the retrievable data is simply pass/fail and a visual confirmation that emergency lighting is sufficient.
Examples of known emergency backup lighting systems are locally maintained and non-maintained battery backup fixtures, where both require a constant live feed to ensure the batteries can be charged. A maintained fixture has a switched feed to allow the light to be controlled without switching to emergency battery mode and an emergency luminaire that remains lit even when the system is not in emergency mode. A non-maintained emergency luminaire is a luminaire whose lamps only come on when the power supply to the lighting fails. Another example of a known emergency backup lighting system is a centralized battery system, which replaces the main feed to the lighting system circuits in the event of main power outage.
The performance of the emergency fixtures in the event of a main power outage is currently ensured by standardized test procedures (for example, monthly and annual tests) carried out and validated by, for example, a maintenance engineer who signs-off on the procedure. These emergency tests require extensive human interaction with the system such as monthly appointments to cut the power to the main unswitched supply to each circuit, check all the emergency lights, and sign a register that the test was carried out and all emergency lights worked according to requirements. Further, the test will occupy the maintenance engineer for at least the required time of the test, e.g., 3 hours in the UK.
For at least the above reasons, there is a need for an automated system and method for testing and managing emergency lighting. Further, there is a need for an automated system and method for predicting life expectancy of an emergency lighting system including, among other things, a luminaire, LED, and backup power supply.